Robert McKay: Blog

What's after SWA?

April 20, 2013

Posted at 1:32 pm

As I've mentioned before, the story I'm currently posting, Sweet Home Alabama, is the last completed Carpenter story. And it looks like it'll be the last - after half a dozen years of the Carpenter family dominating my thoughts, they're now fading away. They came, they conquered, and now they're going. Why it worked like that is beyond me - I'm just glad I got to spend some time with them.

My writing is, right now, almost nil. I'm always a poet, though long periods can go by when I don't write a single poem. But fiction is something else entirely. I've had years go by where I not only didn't write a single piece of fiction, but didn't much care if I did.

However, I don't know that my fiction impulse is entirely dead right now. This past week I've written two short stories - vignettes, almost. They're considerably darker than either the Carpenter stories or the Christian romances which take place in the Carpenter universe. And I'm not satisfied with them - they seem to promise a lot and deliver only a fraction of it. But I may wind up writing in a different direction - more "literary," perhaps, though I'll never be up to the quality of Ernest Hemingway.

At any rate, when SWA is done I probably will vanish into the haze. But I may, and that's a definite may, return some time with something completely different. :)